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Some Problems and Challenges in Gadamer's Hermeneutics

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Some Problems and Challenges in Gadamer's Hermeneutics Between Enlightenment and Romanticism: Some Problems and Challenges in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics KRISTIN GJESDAL* for post-analytical philosophers such as Richard Rorty and John McDowell, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1960) has played an important role in their battles against Cartesian epistemology.1 In this context, it is little known that when Gadamer started working on Truth and Method in the early 1930s, he did not want only to criticize the framework of modern epistemology. Rather, the initial intention of his work was to “demonstrate that art can convey truth.”2 In Gadamer’s view, such a demonstration could not be of a merely systematic na- ture, but also had to engage with the historical development of aesthetics; it had to overcome the way in which Kant and the romantics had come to deny art any significance as knowledge. Since the publication of Truth and Method, Gadamer’s discussion of art and aesthetics—his critique of Kant, the romantics, and the general philosophical paradigm that he terms ‘aesthetic consciousness’—has received only scant atten- tion.3 By contrast, the second and third parts of the work—addressing, respectively, 1For Rorty’s reading of Gadamer, see Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 357–95; and “Der Vorlesungsgast,” in Begegnungen mit Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Günter Figal, trans. Joachim Schulte (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000), 87–92. For McDowell’s application of Gadamerian insights and concepts, see John McDowell, Mind and Nature (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1996), xi–xxiv and 108–26; and “Gadamer, Davidson, and the Ground of Understanding,” in Gadamer’s Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer [Gadamer’s Century], ed. Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald, and Jens Kertscher (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2002), 173–94. 2Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Writing and the Living Voice,” in Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History, ed. Dieter Misgeld and Graeme Nicholson, trans. Lawrence Schmidt and Monica Reuss (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992), 63. 3It is symptomatic that even a reader as charitable as Jean Grondin finds himself forced to characterize the first part of Truth and Method as “a detour” (Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics * Kristin Gjesdal is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Temple University. Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 46, no. 2 (2008) 285–306 [285] 286 journal of the history of philosophy 4 6 : 2 a p r i l 2 0 0 8 the relevance of the human sciences and the linguistic foundation of hermeneu- tics—have been subject to much interest. Here Gadamer aims at transcending the way in which the Enlightenment conception of reason, truth, and knowledge, developing in the wake of Descartes, has had a tendency to evade the implications of our situatedness within tradition and history. Gadamer, however, has always insisted on the unity of his work. What he wanted, he explains, was not only to overcome the subjectivization of art by aesthetic consciousness, but also to “develop from this starting point a conception of knowledge and truth that corresponds to the whole of our experience.”4 This essay explores the relation between Gadamer’s understanding of art and his notion of hermeneutic reason, and argues that, while Gadamer’s critique of the Enlightenment is itself inadequate and biased, his hermeneutics should not be understood in strict opposition to the Enlightenment project as such. Against the criticisms launched by Habermas, Apel, and Tugendhat, I claim that Gadam- er’s early notion of dialogue is itself fueled by enlightenment aspirations. The problem, however, is that Gadamer fails to live up to these aspirations. Modeling his notion of tradition on the sublime world-disclosure of art, his hermeneutics becomes entrenched in an unresolved tension between enlightenment and anti- enlightenment impulses. The essay is divided into nine sections. Having first addressed Gadamer’s cri- tique of the aesthetic consciousness (section 1) and his discussion of “the Cartesian basis” of the philosophical Enlightenment (section 2), I proceed to look at his attempt at carving out a philosophical middle ground between enlightenment objectivism and romantic subjectivism (section 3). The next part of the essay provides a more detailed analysis of Gadamer’s relation to the Enlightenment. I claim that Gadamer’s critique of the Enlightenment is inadequate (section 4). Yet Gadamer’s hermeneutics is not, as proposed by Habermas, Apel, and Tugendhat, a straightforward anti-Enlightenment philosophy (section 5). Against such a pro- posal, I claim that Gadamer’s notion of dialogical reason, as developed in the late 1920s, aspires to be a continuation of the enlightenment project (section 6). In the final sections I discuss Gadamer’s turn towards tradition and effective history. I claim that Gadamer’s understanding of tradition in Truth and Method fails to live up to the enlightenment aspirations of his work on dialogical reason (section 7), and that his notion of tradition moves too closely to the sublime self-forgetfulness that characterizes the experience of art (section 8). This, I conclude, leads to an unresolved tension in Gadamer’s hermeneutics, between enlightenment commit- [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994], 110). It is also worth noting that to the extent that the Library of Living Philosopher’s volume on Gadamer deals with aesthetics, it is in the form of offering a discussion of the hermeneutic theory of art, not of the hermeneutic critique of aesthetic conscious- ness. See Lewis E. Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Chicago: Open Court, 1997). Two recent publications on Gadamer—Robert J. Dostal, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer [Cambridge Companion] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Gadamer’s Century—almost evade Gadamer’s discussion of art and aesthetics. 4Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1994), xxiii; Wahrheit und Methode, Gesammelte Werke, 2 vols. (Tübingen: J. B. C. Mohr, 1993), 3. Subsequent references to this work will be to ‘TM’ (Truth and Method) and ‘WM’ (Wahrheit und Methode). Unless explicitly noted, all references to Wahrheit und Methode refer to volume one. between enlightenment and romanticism 287 ments, on the one hand, and a romantic turn to the world-disclosive truth of art, on the other hand (section 9). 1 . overcoming aesthetic consciousness In alignment with Hegel’s critique in the Phenomenology of Spirit of the “beautiful soul,” Gadamer’s concept of aesthetic consciousness designates a tendency to consider our relation to art and beauty in terms of subjective feelings.5 At stake is a set of post-Kantian positions in aesthetics—positions that, while drawing on the resources of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, articulate a romantic philosophy of art (Goethe, Schiller, Schlegel, Schelling, and Schleiermacher all figure in Gadamer’s account).6 Historically speaking, the shift from a focus on taste and the power of judgment to a focus on art is most decisive. Moreover, it is a shift that Gadamer in principle endorses.7 In his view, however, the problem with aesthetic consciousness is that, while it moves from a (Kantian) focus on taste and judgment to a (romantic) focus on art, it fails to leave behind the Kantian subjectivization of beauty.8 The romantics were disappointed by the way in which, throughout the En- lightenment, science had come to monopolize our understanding of human existence. On Gadamer’s reading, this disappointment triggers an interest in creative genius. Fuelled by Fichte’s subjective idealism and his elevation of “genius 5The “beautiful soul” represents for Hegel a subjectivist turn within our understanding of moral and ethical life. It is driven by contempt for a society that is no longer beautiful, and can find consola- tion only in a withdrawal to the allegedly uncontaminated and pristine domain of the inner. Unable to realize its moral consciousness in the world of human practice, the “beautiful soul” ends up living “in dread of besmirching the splendor of its inner being [seines Innern] by action and an existence; and, in order to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with the actual world [flieht es die Berührung der Wirklichkeit]” (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. J. N. Finley [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], 400; Phenomenologie des Geistes: Werke in 20 Bänden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986], vol. 3, 483). 6Among others, Richard Bernstein (Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis [Beyond Objectivism and Relativism] [London: Basil Blackwell, 1983], 119) suggests that Gadamer’s critique of aesthetic consciousness is a critique of Kant’s subjectivization of judgment-power. “It is,” he claims, Kant’s “‘radical subjectivization’ of aesthetic judgment that Gadamer calls ‘aesthetic conscious- ness’.” In the light of Gadamer’s early discussion of aesthetic consciousness, in an essay entitled “Zur Fragwürdigkeit des ästhetischen Bewußtseins” (1958), such a claim might possibly be sustained. Here aesthetic consciousness is identified with our capacity for aesthetic judging, and as autonomous, this capacity is given its first, systematic justification in Kant’s third Critique. As Gadamer puts it, Das ästhetische Urteil ist eine Funktion des ästhetischen Bewußtseins (“Zur Fragwürdigkeit des ästhetischen Bewußtseins,” Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8, 9). However, although
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